Homicide/Missing Persons Investigations during Natural Disasters
October 11, 2018 9:23 AM   Subscribe

How would a homicide and/or missing persons investigation be handled during a natural disaster? How does the timeline get shifted in those situations?

*This is for a work of fiction*

If someone disappears during a natural disaster (specifically a devastating hurricane, like Andrew or Katrina), how would a missing persons/homicide investigation work?
How would the hurricane impact timelines? Are police expected to get back to work immediately or does detective work get replaced by recovery for a while?
How do the police determine who is just missing and who is missing because of foul play? Likewise, how do they determine if the cause of death is the hurricane or foul play?
How do detectives work if police stations or headquarters are devastated?
posted by mrfuga0 to Law & Government (4 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
This played out in Katrina - there's write-ups on some of what happened.

Example 1

Example 2

Doing searches for Katrina hurricane missing person investigation will find similar articles.
posted by Candleman at 10:08 AM on October 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


I know it's not, strictly speaking, helpful to say this, but: I'd love to read a story about how some small-town PD figures this out without knowing anything. Add in some hand-waving about "No, we can't just ask New Orleans how to do it because the phone grid is still all screwed up", and this would be a great story. Hell, it could even be a larger department that bought some half-assed off-the-shelf procedure manual a decade ago, and as soon as Detective Protagonist opens it up, they realize that it's shit.
posted by Etrigan at 10:26 AM on October 11, 2018 [3 favorites]


One of the Harry Bosch books (The Black Box) has Harry following up on the cold case of a woman murdered during the LA riots. The first chapter has him on the scene of the crime the day it happened, and then the rest of the book is solving the case 20 years later. It's fictional. Obviously not quite the same as a natural disaster, but the first chapter would give you an idea of how something similar has been written before.
posted by phunniemee at 12:51 PM on October 11, 2018


My mom was a police officer in a small town devastated by Katrina. Definitely for the first few days they had 0 capacity for anything other than finding clean water, food, and places to sleep. Even after that, there was so much debris everywhere that travel within the city was very, very difficult (our home had floated into the middle of the street (no, it was not a manufactured home!)). Does the murder take place during the storm? Immediately after? I mean, lots of people weren’t “missing” after Katrina but they evacuated and then just...never came back. Their homes and everything they owned were gone, so what would they return to? At least where she was, they had a pretty good idea of who was “riding out” the storm and not evacuating, but a drowning in one of those households during the storm would never have been questioned. After the storm, FEMA, military, and relief groups started rolling in and they were very busy trying to administer that and keep people out of unsafe areas.
posted by itsamermaid at 8:54 PM on October 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


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